HMV’s recent sale has had some great offers on albums from £2.99! I decided to take advantage, making an order for a total of 7 CDs from their web site.

Next time, I think I’ll give the HMV site a miss as their billing policy boils down to spamming your account with separate transactions for each item. For me this was picked up by my bank as suspicious activity, resulting in my card being blocked and being unable to access my account for 48 hours!

I was rather surprised to find this policy confirmed by customer services and the site’s help section. When I informed them that their actions had resulted in my card being blocked I was met with the reply, “Yes, that can happen”. The call was concluded when I was informed that “yes, you should avoid making large orders from our website”!

It continues to amaze me that the largest high street retailers can get things so wrong on their websites and, in this case, be so reckless and irresponsible with their customers accounts. Furthermore, when alerted to this serious problem, why do they seem completely indifferent with no intention to fix the issue?